How are the data management challenges facing Internet and e-commerce companies increasing?
The value proposition of many dot-com companies is information management. The market is placing enormous valuations on Internet startups in the belief that they will corner their market. In the traditional economy, cornering the market meant achieving dominant market share with your products or services. However, the bulk of the dot-com companies today are providing services that will never justify their lofty valuations. Instead, the market is paying them for the rich base of consumer information they are gathering. This valuation is based on an implicit promise that these dot-coms will know what to do with the vast quantity of data they are gathering. Mostly, they don’t have a clue. They have a vision to sell the concept but they lack the data management skills to follow through on the promise. Q: Where is all the data coming from? A: Everyone is talking about mining clickstream data. Buried in there somewhere are keys to consumer behavior, or so goes the myth. Analyzing this vast p
